Planning and tracking hospital capacity with apps in Microsoft Teams
Managing resource availability in healthcare is a critical factor for obvious reasons. Not only is it essential to ensure the treatment of patients in the short term. There are also clear implications in the long term from unhappy medical professionals choosing to work elsewhere if adequate staffing isn’t taken care of.
Recently Forward Forever implemented a solution for a healthcare provider managing the staff in a certain hospital. They had an existing process for planning the resource requirements as well as capturing the data – in Excel, of course. The task we were given was to show how the resource management process could be modernized with tools in the Microsoft cloud.
The end result was a combination of Power Platform low-code tools new to the organization and the smarter use of existing collaboration tools already at their disposal via Microsoft Teams. The user experience for working on the capacity planning and actuals tracking was implemented as Power Apps canvas apps targeted to the desktop use and mobile devices respectively:
The data management solution underneath these apps was built on top of Dataverse for Teams. This means that all the users of the Power Apps applications are fully covered via their Office 365 / Microsoft 365 licenses without a requirement to invest in premium Power Apps licenses at this point.
The new Power BI dashboard now acts as the central hub for bringing together both the planned resource allocations as well as the actual hours reported by hospital staff. This means the data entry and manipulation features can be optimized for each target group’s needs, while providing a common control panel for all parties to see their data being used in decision making for aligning resource needs with the availability of skilled healthcare professionals.
This solution is a great example of how the low-code tools already available within your Microsoft Teams environment can be taken into use for solving problems specific to your business processes. Just because the data and the tasks you’re working on are unique to your organization, that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be an app for it.
If you are sharing an Excel workbook that several users need to regularly enter data into, pause for a moment to envision what that process could look like via modern, user friendly apps available on any device. Next, see how you could map the required features into the capabilities found within Microsoft Power Plaform suite of low-code products. If you need help in that mapping process, reach out to us.
You can read more about this solution and other similar apps we’ve built by browsing our App Gallery. For insights on the practical steps to modernize internal processes with Power Platform, check out this blog post from Hilla.